Sarah Darer Littman: Arizona law whites out what the powerful don't like

Published 5:46 pm, Thursday, January 19, 2012

Markus Zusak's brilliant work "The Book Thief" was the first Greenwich Reads Together choice. I facilitated a discussion group in which we talked about some of the major themes in the novel: censorship and the power of words as a force for either good or evil, as a method to dehumanize others.

Little did I realize that life would be imitating art in the state of Arizona. In May 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, known for her proud championing of the heinous anti-immigrant SB1070 legislation, signed HB2281 into law. The bill, promoted by then superintendent of public instruction and now Attorney General Tom Horne, bans any educational programs that: "1. Promote the overthrow of the United States government. 2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people. 3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. 4. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

Clearly this means we shouldn't allow students to study anything about Rick Perry, even if by some extraordinary miracle he's elected president of the United States. After all, the guy threatened to secede from the Union back in 2009.

Because this is totally colorblind and not racist, right?

Wrong, as is apparent from the open letter from Horne to the citizens of Tucson in 2007, which opened: "The TUSD Ethnic Studies Program Should be Terminated."

Bear in mind upon reading Horne's words that Latino students make up over 60 percent of the Tucson Unified School District: "VI. Teaching the Wrong Things About Literature. When I began speaking out publicly against ethnic studies, one of the ethnic studies teachers had his students write me letters. One of these letters states: `All that the English classes teach is mainly about some dead white people.' I believe schools should teach the students to judge literature by its content and not by the race or gender of the author."

Ironic because amongst the books now crated up and prohibited from use is Shakespeare's "The Tempest." I guess the Powers that Be don't like Latino kids exposed to themes of race, colonization, oppression, class and power, even if it is The Bard.

Meanwhile, GOP State Rep. Terri Proud has proposed two bills to allow the Bible to be taught as an elective in high school. But not the Quran, because it "hasn't influenced Western culture the way the Bible has." Guess she never studied algebra.

Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz, another great writer whose works are now prohibited from being taught, said, "If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves ... Growing up, I felt like a monster ... I was like, `Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don't exist?' And part of what inspired me was ... that I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it."

Aside from bigotry, there's the gross stupidity of eliminating a program that works. Ninety-seven percent of students in the TUSD ethnic studies program graduate high school, compared to a 44 percent graduation rate nationally among Latin-American high school students. The state's own auditors, to whom current state Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal paid $170,000 to determine if the program was unpatriotic and ineffective, came back with the exact opposite conclusion.

As Debbie Reese, publisher of American Indians in Children's Literature (americanindiansinchildrensliterature.net), observed, "Students ... showed improvement in grades and graduation rates as a result of taking these classes. Isn't that what schools want to see happen?"

Tom Horne and John Huppenthal need to learn one of the Mayan concepts absorbed by students in the program they just shut down: In Lak'ech Ala K'in -- "You are the other me."